Geek Girl Witter: The Teen genre is written by lazy writers? Whaaaaat??

I was to have asked your opinions about whether every protagonist has to be strong, but that must be postponed in favor of something I just found and even the proposition makes my blood boil. I stumbled upon a a forum question, which is: The Teen genre is written by lazy writers?

Please, excuse me for I will be ranting, but I believe this issue needs to be evened out. Not just this particular question, but some hypotheses about Young Adult books.

First off, if somebody - anybody - ever writes a book, that person is not lazy. Plotting out the story, doing the world building, creating the characters and actually sitting down and writing 75K words or so is anything but laziness under any circumstance. And since the person who asked the question was a writer, he's ought to know it the best.

Yes, we are different and there are people that are more gifted than others. There are people that have more unique voices than others. Are more creative, more emphatic, more experienced, give more thought into a certain book, etc., etc., etc. But they all made a huge, vast, immense effort to start and finish their books. And revise, and edit and revise and edit over and over again until it's as good as it ever will be, and in tradition publishing cases even to send out quires and to not give up after each stinging rejection. Does that sound lazy to you? Or easy at least? To me, hell it does not.

That being said, there are writers that one day just get enlightened and sit down in front of a computer, ready to write a book. Usually, that doesn't end well because nobody is born to be a writer. It requires a lot more practice than talent. You have to write short stories, practice novels, just one-shot blabbering, anything that helps you develop your own, unique writing voice. Teach you to show not tell, yet don't be overly descriptive. To be able to nail the pacing, create 3D characters. If you skip on that you'll have a fat chance of not giving out a bestseller from your hands. Not for the first time anyway. But that's not necessarily a YA phenomenon. It can happen to New Adult books, and adult book, paranormals, romances, sci-fis, fantasies, contemporaries, whatever in the world.

And oh yeah, YA has got tropes. Tons of them. Some of them make our eyes roll like a ferris wheel. Insta-love is a prevalent instance. However, as much as I dislike it in books, it might be just accurate. We, teens, swoon over guys. Sometimes we think we are in love, which later can turn out to be fervent attraction mistaken with love, therefore insta-love. And we have teen problems, duh. First break up. As surprising it is, the first sexual intercourse. It's a freaking big deal for us, don't be pestering just because you're more...experienced. Overprotective or the opposite, abusive parents. Depression. Weight obsessing. Friendships. And even those much criticized clicks in high-school are real. In books it's a bit cornered out, but it's not one to be written down as a full cliché. Up to some degree, it's as real as you and me. Also, it's true that there are writers that are conveniently forget about the parents existence, but it's not a general feature of the Young Adult book type. If it happens to appear in a book, wee do note the problem and not approve of it.

The proposer's main statement is that "The science fiction stories dedicated towards teenagers do not seem to have much thought." I believe that in the last few years, most of the sci-fi genre morphed into something halfway to horror. They mostly have a darker atmosphere, more vicious aliens and are less about going into space and explore it. These days are just not the peak of the classic sci-fi genre, because time passes, things change. Surely, we, teens, never had the Rama or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that are all brilliant examples of witty, classic science fiction, with a lot of distinct types of aliens and a ton of spacey, exploring elements. Our sci-fi books are focusing on being a teenager as well, and that leaves less time to bring out that certain spacey part. But that's not necessarily bad. It's merely a different approach of the subject and it can be just as precious - from that different angle. At the end of the day, everybody will read what interests them.

I'm a little afraid of publishing this post; what if I overreacted? It's the person's view after all and he has the right to have it. Or what if I'm essentially wrong? I don't want to incite a riot with my harsh remark and I don't mean to offend anybody. I simply felt like I needed to voice my opinion on this, the way I see it, quite insulting proposition.

2 comments:

I think your rant is 100% justified. Young Adult seems to get a bad rep in general whether it be readers being accused of not reading 'age appropriate' books, or authors being lazy. One genre isn't better than the other, they are just different.

Thanks, it's good to know I didn't just overreacted. Anyway, yeah YA gets a lot more criticism than any other genre. But less good books are everywhere, not just in YA. Maybe, it's that this is sort of the newest genre. There always have been books for the youth, but not like this. It's true that New Adult books are even fresher, but it might be that YA books are more famous and the bigger the fame is the more bashing something gets.